Category Archives: Opportunities

Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Competition

Daniel Olson asked me to pass this on to y’all, so here it is… thanks Daniel!

Steve –

I know this is a bit late, but I was wondering if you’d be able to pass the
word along via the Cartoonist Conspiracy website about the Minnesota State
Fair Fine Arts Competition.

For anyone interested, the deadline for registering in the Minnesota State
Fair Fine Arts Competition is Monday, July 9th, 2007 11:59 PM. It is open to
ALL Minnesota artists regardless of age. Fortunately, you don’t need to know
what the dimensions of your art is going to be. Instead, you just need to
inform the committee what type of medium you’ll be using. The complete set of
rules are listed on the website, please read them carefully before
submitting an application. Also, if you register, you don’t necessarily have
to enter anything into the competition, although it would probably look bad
if you didn’t. However, you can’t enter anything without registering, so
please register by Monday, July 9th if you want to enter any artwork.
For more info please visit href=”http://www.mnstatefair.org/pages/fine_arts.html”>Minnesota State Fair
Fine Arts Competition.

– Daniel J. Olson

A Couple More Things on the City Pages Opportunity

2 more items on the City Pages opportunity:

  • I confirmed that in addition to the previously mentioned half page sizes, quarter page sizes are also acceptable…9.75″ wide by 3″ tall. Again, you’ll want to leave a quarter inch at the top for the header they are going to put on it, so your working space would really be 9.75″ wide by 2.75″ tall.
  • I also confirmed that 300DPI is acceptable for scanning in greyscale. I would do 800DPI if you are scanning black and white.

At this point we have 20 artists who are planning on participating, and 3 more who are hoping to if they can find the time… and you could too! Let me know if you’re planning on it.

Email me at

More on the City Pages Comics

I have some additional info about the City Pages opportunity mentioned yesterday:

  • Nick Vlcek, the fella who is going to do the layout at City Pages has some size specs for us. The ideal format is a half page. Here are the 1/2 page sizes:
  • 1/2 horizontal is 9.75” by 6.1” tall

    1/2 vertical is 4.87 by 12” tall

    They’re going to have to make them both smaller by about 1/4” (off the top) to title them consisently.

    I would guess they would be fine with quarter pages too, so I’ll ask.

    I’m also asking about scan sizes… I assume 300 DPI greyscale or 800 DPI black and white scans should do the trick, but I’m going to confirm.

  • Kevin Cannon of Big Time Attic has kindly offered to scan any artwork you get to him before July 3rd. Just drop it off or slide it under the door in an envelope at Big Time Attic. Big Time Attic is located in the same building as Diamond’s Coffee shop where we have our monthly meetings the first Thursday of every month… it’s at 1618 Central Ave NE in Minneapolis… they are in suite 216.
  • City Pages will be running all of the comics submitted on their website, regardless of whether they have the room to run them in the print version. So anyone who does this will get paid something, presumably. Participants will have to discuss what makes sense for splitting up whatever funds are earned from this.
  • We’ve already had 12 people commit to doing a comic for this, and a couple more who are hoping to find the time. The more the merrier! The cartoonists definitely doing one at this point are:
  • It should be a hell of a feature, I imagine.

  • Again, please let me know asap if you plan on definitely participating in this.

Twin Cities Cartoonists, City Pages Wants Your Comics

City Pages is doing a cartoon feature in an issue next month on the subject of "True Tales of the Twin Cities," and City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman has asked us to provide the content. This is a wonderful opportunity for both the individual cartoonists featured and the Cartoonist Conspiracy in general, and I hope a lot of you will submit work for it.

Here is the bullet pointed info for your perusal…

  • The deadline is the end of the next Cartoonist Conspiracy meeting on July 5th starting at 6:30 at Diamond’s Coffee Shoppe. At that meeting, in addition to the traditional jam comics, people will be encouraged to create a comic to potentially run in the City Pages on the subject of "True Tales of the Twin Cities." We will collect submissions at the end of the meeting to scan and send over… artwork will be returned at the following month’s meeting. If you have done the work in advance of the meeting, we would greatly appreciate if you scan it yourself and give it to us on a cd.
  • Doing work on this strip in advance of the meeting is strongly encouraged… we want to dazzle the City Pages readers with our collective talent, so hopefully many of you will be inspired to do something more thoughtful than you might do during one of our four hour meetings.
  • If you are planning on submitting, please let me know by next Thursday, June 28th (the sooner the better).  Mr. Hoffman is hoping to get an idea of the head count in advance so he can plan accordingly. Please don’t commit unless you definitely intend to deliver. You can email me at .
  • They estimate that they will run 7 or 8 strips if they get enough worthy material. They have at least five pages to run it on. They did not specify format, so I believe that is open. Obviously, if you run over multiple pages, it could reduce the chances of it being run.
  • Don’t use color.
  • Sign your work. Put your contact information on the back. Work given to us without contact information will not be submitted.
  • Include your url in the strip if you have a website so people can find more of your work. If you don’t have a website, you really should… if you want something quick, comicspace makes it easy as peach pie to show your work off.
  • City Pages is certainly not intended to be a family publication, and you are certainly encouraged to submit whatever you want to… but they probably wouldn’t run a lot of the sort of content that shows up in a typical one of our jams, so you may want to save the giant ball of swinging johnsons pooping in Christ’s butt for another comic.
  • This is a paying gig… what it pays will be most likely determined by their budget for it (which has not yet been determined) divided by the number of cartoonists who get work published in the issue.
  • You don’t have to consider yourself a member of the Cartoonist Conspiracy to submit, although you will probably be associated with us if you do. Perhaps you’re already a member and you simply don’t know it? Go here for more information about becoming a Conspirator.
  • If this goes well, they will most likely want to do it again in the future.

There may be more updates before the meeting, so keep your eye on the Cartoonist Conspiracy blog. Thanks much to those of you who plan on participating.